Reddit First to Announce SOPA Boycott

The venerable and sometimes troubled social news outlet Reddit announced today that it would go dark on January 18th to protest the upcoming votes on anti Internet piracy legislation in the House and Senate. Upcoming votes on the Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) in the House and the Protect IP Act in the Senate prompted the site to announce that they will suspend normal operations of the site on January 18th from 8:00am until 8:00pm. Instead of the normal user-defined news channels, Reddit visitors will see links to anti-Sopa sites and live video streams of Congressional testimony on the legislation.

Lively responses have been appearing on the Reddit site and several comments in support of the move are also encouraging Facebook and Google to follow suit. Its hard to imagine those two huge tech giants following Reddit into the breach, but if they do, that would be quite a protest.